Steve Dower <steve.do...@microsoft.com> writes: > Ben Finney wrote: > > The restrictions of the license terms make MS Windows an > > unacceptable risk on any machine I'm responsible for. > > Just out of interest, which restrictions would those be?
It has been a long time since I bothered to read any of the numerous license texts from Microsoft, so I can't cite specific clauses. From memory, unacceptable restrictions include: * Restricting the instance to specific hardware, instead of leaving it up to the recipient to run the work they paid for on any hardware they choose. * Forbidding reverse-engineering of the OS to see how it behaves. * Forbidding collaboration with other recipients to discover how the OS behaves. * Refusal to disclose the source code for the running OS to the recipient. * Forbidding the recipient from getting their choice of vendor to make improvements to the OS and collaborate with other recipients on the improvements. * Arrogating control of the running OS to a party other than the license recipient, including the ability to (at Microsoft's sole discretion) deny applications to run, and to disable features of the OS. * Arrogating data collection to Microsoft and undisclosed third parties, tracking broad classes of activity on the OS and sending the logs to a server not of the recipient's choosing. > Does this prevent you from creating a VM on a cloud provider on your > own account? If I need to accept restrictions such as the above, I don't see that the location of the instance (nor the fees charged) has any affect on these concerns. The risks discussed above are not mitigated. > If the licensing is a real issue, I'm in a position where I can have a > positive impact on fixing it, so any info you can provide me (on- or > off-list) about your concerns is valuable. Thank you for this offer, I am glad to see willingness expressed to solve these restrictions. I hope you can achieve software freedom for all recipients of Microsoft operating systems. Until then, the risk is too great to anyone to whom I have professional responsibilities, and my advice must continue to be that they avoid accepting such restrictions. -- \ “Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.” —Edsger W. | `\ Dijkstra | _o__) | Ben Finney _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
